Caring for our Teaching Artists

RISCA hosted its first Self-Care Day for Teaching Artists on Sunday, Nov. 19. Fifteen teaching artists working in community education and health settings gathered at SHRI Studio. This day designed to provide space to rest, reset, and recharge included three artist facilitated sessions as well as unstructured time to be alone or connect with each other. Artists had an opportunity to write a community poem on What Self Care means to them and create a wall of art using tape.   

Group sessions included Narrative Comics Visual Journaling as Self-Reflection with illustrator and printmaker Nat Brennan. This session included an introduction to diary comics followed by open work time, sharing, and further open-ended discussions about how visual journaling and image-making leads to self-reflection and acknowledgment of our own struggles, accomplishments, and interpersonal relationships.  

Wendy Grossman a writer who writes poetry, memoir and personal essays and poet and performer Sussy Santana led a Reposo/Repose session. This was an invitation for all to come into reposo by evoking the letting go of mental chatter, and to cultivate self-compassion through breath, grounding practices, and writing prompts that help us nurture ourselves from a place of kindness and calm. 

We ended the day with Sidy Maiga, a Djembe Master from Mali, inviting artists into a drum circle. Sharing the origins of the Djembe drum, Sidy demonstrated how to create a variety of sounds and rhythms followed by drumming individually and together as a group.